EU Gets Cold Feet Over Google Fine, Fears Potential Trump Backlash

The European Union has put plans to fine Google on hold. The commission in charge of doling out punishment for digital infractions is reportedly worried that fining the U.S. tech giant for allegedly abusing its dominance in online advertising could provoke U.S. President Donald Trump.

Bloomberg and Reuters reported, citing unnamed sources, that E.U. officials had planned to announce the antitrust sanction on Monday; however, that deadline came and went without an announcement.

The Commission has been investigating Google’s dominant ad tech businesses since 2021, looking at how the company benefits from operating on both sides of the digital ad market. Regulators were expected to hit Google with a fine and possibly force it to sell part of its ad business.

MLex, which first reported the delay, says the Commission told Google last Friday that its probe was done. But at the last minute, senior officials outside of the antitrust team raised concerns that the announcement could anger Trump, derail trade talks, and potentially spark new tariffs.

The Commission and Google did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s requests for comment.

The Commission’s worries aren’t unfounded. Trump has repeatedly used the threat of tariffs to push his agenda and help American businesses.

Just last week, he threatened tariffs and more restrictions on chip exports to countries that implement a digital services tax. He posted on Truth Social that these taxes are “designed to harm, or discriminate against, American Technology” while giving “a complete pass to China’s largest Tech Companies.” Trump slammed the taxes, which are already in place or proposed across several European countries, saying that American tech companies are “neither the ‘piggy bank’ nor the ‘doormat’ of the world any longer.”

The European Union’s decision to delay its planned sanctions against Google comes just weeks after the E.U. and U.S. issued a joint statement regarding an agreed framework for a balanced trade deal. Still, while negotiating trade terms with the U.S., the E.U. said in a fact sheet that changes to its digital rules “were not on the table.”

However, news of the delayed sanction has now raised alarms across Europe. Germany’s Monopolies Commission called it an alarming precedent for the independence of E.U. antitrust enforcement. “The protection of competition must not become a pawn of the Trump administration,” Chairman Tomaso Duso said in a statement, according to Reuters.

Stéphanie Yon-Courtin, a French member of the European Parliament, posted on X that “if this is true, it sends a very bad signal. The digital rules are not negotiable!” She urged the Commission to make clear that the EU will not back down to American pressure.

Whatever ends up happening in Europe, Google is still in hot water stateside. The E.U. probe ran alongside U.S. litigation, which resulted in a federal judge ruling in April that Google was operating an ad tech monopoly. A two-week remedy trial in the Department of Justice’s lawsuit is set to start on September 22nd.